There has always been a concern in accordance on how Bitcoin whales are able to manipulate the markets by dumping large quantities of coins at any given time. We have observed the results of this time and time again, the prime example being the Mt. Gox selloffs. The question if other altcoins can suffer the same fate should be raised, especially as limited addresses hold so many coins for most altcoins.
Top 10 EOS Holders
Studies revealed that only ten addresses hold almost 50% of the total supply of EOS. Around 500 million EOS tokens equating to 49.67% of the total 1 billion supplied are held in 10 addresses. 100 million tokens, or 10% of the total are in the hands of the company behind the EOS ICO, the Block.one. This was according to research from six independent snapshots of EOS ownership.
The remaining nine addresses are difficult to distinguish. However, the smallest one holds 20.6 million and the other eight addresses hold 380 million EOS tokens. This makes the top ten EOS holders very powerful as they can do massive impacts on what they want with the market should they agree on it as a single individual.
EOS Exchanges
It has been deliberated that exchanges could have the responsibility for these addresses, and the top traders for EOS currently are Bithumb, Huobi, OKEx, Upbit and Bitfinex, consecutively. $832 million is currently the total trade volume over the top five. Binance and Block.one addresses are possible to complete another two of the top ten EOS rich list.
The figures posted revealed how powerful the top thousand addresses were. Combining all the top 1000 addresses amounts to 858,120,383 tokens, or nearly 86% of the total circulating volume. It was hypothesized that the rest of the EOS holders had fair influence over the ecosystem.
The Top 1001 and Lower
For everyone else ranked 1001 or lower on the EOS rich list, even if all the remaining 162,930 accounts voted the same way, it would still only be worth 13.86% of the votes, and we would still need the support of those in the Top 1000 to vote the same way as us. If The Top 1000 (or even the Top 100 or less) decides to go one way, there’s nothing the remaining 162,930 accounts will be able to do about it. This issue raises the argument regarding the level of democracy that the project offers.